by
Damien F. Mackey
Yahuda … was an expert in his field. His
profound knowledge of Egyptian and Hebrew combined (not to mention Akkadian)
gave him a distinct advantage over fellow Egyptologists unacquainted with
Hebrew, who thus could not discern any
appreciable Egyptian influence on the
Pentateuch.
Whilst I have previously written on the
important linguistic contribution to the Pentateuch as made by professor A. S.
Yahuda (“a Palestinian Jew, polymath, teacher, writer, researcher,
linguist, and collector of rare documents”: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abraham_Yahuda ) - and still continue basically to
accept the professor’s findings - I would now be inclined to modify a few of
the points that he had made.
For a better appreciation of what follows, one might like to read e.g. my
article:
Structure of the Book of Genesis
….
It could be said that the
ancient literary methods pointed out by P. J. Wiseman in favour of Mosaïc compilation
of Genesis were also around much later than Moses, prevailing even into New
Testament times (e.g. Matthew 1:1 gives a toledôt
of Jesus Christ in the Gospels), and hence these literary methods could have
been inserted into texts composed at the time of, say, the Babylonian Exile
(C6th BC, conventional dating), almost a millennium after Moses, to give these
texts an air of sacredness or antiquity.
After all, what Wiseman was
drawing his information from were Babylonian scribal techniques, not, say,
Egyptian ones, which were quite different.
So, why would Moses - let
alone the patriarchs who preceded him - necessarily have had any involvement in
the Book of Genesis?
Well, this is where the
linguistic contribution of professor A. S. Yahuda (Language of
the Pentateuch
in Its Relation to Egyptian (Oxford UP, 1933) comes in to deal a
shock blow to both the documentary theory and to the related Pan-Babylonianism.
Yahuda was, unlike Wiseman, an
expert in his field. His profound knowledge of Egyptian and Hebrew combined
(not to mention Akkadian) gave him a distinct advantage over fellow
Egyptologists unacquainted with Hebrew, who thus could not discern any
appreciable Egyptian influence on the Pentateuch. Yahuda however realized that
the Pentateuch was absolutely saturated with Egyptian - not only for the
periods associated with Egypt, most notably the Joseph narrative including
Israel's sojourn in Egypt, but even for the periods associated with, as he
thought, Babylonia.
For example, the Flood and the
Babel incident.
Comment: This now need to be
modified somewhat, however - so I think - in light of my more recent:
Tightening
the Geography and Archaeology for Early Genesis
For instance, instead of the
Akkadian word for 'Ark' used in the Mesopotamian Flood accounts, or even the
Canaanite ones current elsewhere in the Bible, the Noachic account Yahuda noted,
uses the Egyptian-based tebah (Egyptian db.t, `box, coffer, chest').
Most important was the
linguistic observation by Yahuda:
Whereas those books of Sacred
Scripture which were admittedly written during and after the Babylonian Exile
reveal in language and style such an unmistakable Babylonian influence that
these newly-entered foreign elements leap to the eye, by contrast in the first
part of the Book of Genesis, which describes the earlier Babylonian period, the
Babylonian influence in the language is so minute as to be almost non-existent.
Dead Sea Scrolls expert, Fr.
Jean Carmignac, had been able to apply the same sort of bilingual expertise -
in his case, Greek and Hebrew - to gainsay the received scholarly opinion and
show that the New Testament writings in Greek had Hebrew originals: his
argument for a much earlier dating than is usual for the New Testament books.
See my article on this:
Fr Jean
Carmignac dates Gospels early
While Yahuda's argument is
totally Egypto-centric, at least for the Book of Genesis, one does also need to
consider the likelihood of 'cultural traffic' from Palestine to Egypt,
especially given the prominence of Joseph in Egypt from age 80-110. One might
expect that the toledôt documents
borne by Israel into Egypt would have become of great interest to the Egyptians
under the régime of the Vizier, Joseph (historically Imhotep of Egypt's 3rd
dynasty), who had after all saved the nation of Egypt from a 7-year famine,
thereby influencing Egyptian thought and concepts.
The combination of Wiseman and
Yahuda, in both cases clear-minded studies based on profound analysis of
ancient documents, is an absolute bomb waiting to explode all over any
artificially constructed literary theory of Genesis.
Whilst I. Kikawada and A. Quinn
(Before
Abraham Was: The Unity of Genesis 1-11, Abingdon,
1985) have managed to find some merit in the JEDP theory, and I have
also suggested how its analytical tools may be useful at least when applied to
the apparent multiple sourcing in the Flood narrative (and perhaps in the Esau
and Jacob narrative), the system appears as inherently artificial in the light
of archaeological discoveries.
U. Cassuto may not have been “diplomatic”
(according to Kikawada and Quinn), but nevertheless he was basically correct in
his estimation of documentism: "This imposing and beautiful edifice has,
in reality, nothing to support it and is founded on air".
It is no coincidence that
documentary theory was developed during the era of the German philosopher
Immanuel Kant, who proposed an a priori approach
to extramental reality, quite different from the common sense approach of the
Aristotelian philosophy of being.
The philosophy of science is
saturated with this new approach. See e.g.:
Gavin
Ardley’s Marvellous Perception of the Nature of the Modern Sciences
Kantianism is well and truly
evident, too - as it seems to me - in the Karl Heinrich Graf and Julius Wellhausen attitude to
the biblical texts.
And Eduard Meyer carried this
over into his study of Egyptian chronology, by devising in his mind a quantifying
a priori theory - an entirely
artificial one that had no substantial bearing on reality - that he imposed
upon his subject with disastrous results.
Again an "imposing and
beautiful edifice … founded on air".
See my article:
Berlin Chronologist Dr. Eduard Meyer Doubted Moses. Part
Two: Irony of Meyer's Kantianism
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